The invention relates generally to communication systems. More particularly, embodiments of the invention relate to controlling radio resources in a communication system.
High Speed Uplink Packet Access (HSUPA) is a packet-based data service of Universal Mobile Telecommunication Services (UMTS) with typical data transmission capacity of a few megabits per second, thus enabling the use of symmetric high-speed data services, such as video conferencing, between user equipment and a network infrastructure.
An uplink data transfer mechanism in the HSUPA is provided by physical HSUPA channels, such as an Enhanced Dedicated Physical Data Channel (E-DPDCH), implemented on top of Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) uplink physical data channels such as a Dedicated Physical Control Channel (DPCCH) and a Dedicated Physical Data Channel (DPDCH), thus sharing radio resources, such as power resources, with the WCDMA uplink physical data channels. The sharing of the radio resources results in inflexibility in radio resource allocation to the physical HSUPA channels and the WCDMA physical data channels. In CDMA, which is a non-orthogonal multiple access scheme, the signals from different users within the same cell interfere with one another. This type of interference is known as the intra-cell interference. In addition, the base station also receives the interference from the users transmitting in neighboring cells. This is known as the inter-cell interference.
Uplink power control is typically intended to control the received signal power from the active user equipments (UEs) to the base as well as the rise-over-thermal (RoT), which is a measure of the total interference (intra- and inter-cell) relative to the thermal noise. In systems such as HSUPA, fast power control is required due to the fast fluctuation in multi-user (intra-cell) interference. This fast fluctuation will otherwise result in the well-known near-far problem. Moreover, as uplink transmission in an HSUPA system is not orthogonal, the signal from each transmitting UE is subject to interference from another transmitting UE. If the signal strength of UEs varies substantially, a stronger UE (for example, a UE in favorable channel conditions experiencing a power boost due to constructive short term channel fading such as Rayleigh fading) may completely overwhelm the signal of a weaker UE (with signal experiencing attenuation due to short term fading). To mitigate this problem, fast power control has been considered previously in the art where fast power control commands are transmitted from a base station to each UE to set the power of uplink transmission. As the objective of these power control commands is to combat short term channel fading for typical UE speeds and carrier frequencies in the order of 1 GHz, their transmission rate is in the order of 1 millisecond. This is also typically the order of a transmission time interval. In addition to this fast power control (a.k.a. inner loop power control), a slow power control (a.k.a. outer loop power control) to ensure that each of the user dedicated channels and other uplink control channels have sufficient Ec/Nt (chip SNR) for demodulation (see TR25.896 of 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) for HSUPA).
When an orthogonal multiple access scheme such as Single-Carrier Frequency Division Multiple Access (SC-FDMA)—which includes interleaved and localized Frequency Division Multiple Access (FDMA) or Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA)—is used; multi-user interference is not present for low mobility and small for moderate mobility. This is the case for the next generation UMTS enhanced-UTRA (E-UTRA) system—which employs SC-FDMA—as well as IEEE 802.16e also known as Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX)—which employs OFDMA, In this case, the fluctuation in the total interference only comes from inter-cell interference and thermal noise which tends to be slower. While fast power control can be utilized, it can be argued that its advantage is minimal. Hence, only slow power control is needed for orthogonal multiple access schemes.